Many conventional receivers "wake up" periodically to determine if any messages (pages) are scheduled to be transmitted to the receiver. If no messages are scheduled, the receiver will power down in order to extend the battery life of the receiver. One such communication system currently being developed with such power-saving capabilities is the next generation Code-Division Multiple-Access (CDMA) cellular communication system, more commonly referred to as cdma2000, or Wideband CDMA. As illustrated in FIG. 1, cdma2000 utilizes a plurality of 20 millisecond (ms) synchronous frames 102 (shown as F.sub.0, F.sub.1, F.sub.2, . . . , F.sub.K). Frames 102 are transmitted during a periodically occurring time span corresponding to a transmission cycle which has a predetermined duration (e.g., 1.28*2.sup.N seconds, where N is zero or a positive integer). A mobile station within a cdma2000 system is assigned a group of four frames (referred to as a slot) in which all messages for the particular mobile station are to be transmitted. A mobile station operating as such is said to be operating in a "slotted mode." Slotted mode operation allows a cdma2000 mobile station to power up for a single assigned paging slot every 1.28*2.sup.N seconds.
In order to further conserve power, all addresses for mobile stations that are to receive messages during a particular slot are broadcast prior to broadcasting page data. If a mobile station's address is not broadcast, the mobile station can power down for the remainder of the slot. FIG. 2 shows slot 200 having four frames. As shown, a first portion 201 of slot 200 contains address information for all mobile stations that have page data within slot 200. A particular mobile station assigned to slot 200 will awake during the transmission time for slot 200. The mobile station will receive the first frame, and if the mobile station's address is not contained within the first portion 201 of slot 200, the mobile station will power down prior to receiving the rest of slot 200.
During situations where many mobile stations assigned to a slot are being paged, the address information may be contained in a time period greater than a single frame. Because of this, address information may be contained within a second frame of the slot. This is illustrated in FIG. 3, where a first portion 301 (containing address information) of slot 300 is actually contained within two frames. Because information contained within a slot is encoded using codes such as convolutional codes before it is interleaved, a mobile station needs to receive the whole frame's content all at the same time. Thus, when address information is contained within two frames, a mobile station will need to receive and decode two frames prior to powering down. Thus, a mobile station will actually be powered up for the whole duration of the second frame, when only a portion of that frame contains address information. Thus a need exists for a method for transmitting and receiving address information within a communication system that does not require a mobile station to receive and decode frames containing very little address information.